More Isn’t Always Better – Challenging the Growth at All Costs Mindset

What is a Company of One?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, so when I use that term, I’m not saying that you literally have to run a one person business. I don’t even run one person business. But what company of one means is that we don’t assume that growth follows success all the time. What I think we should assume is that freedom follows success, where if you do well, if your business starts to do well or continues to do well, then you should have the freedom to choose whether or not growth makes sense. Because sometimes growth 100% makes sense, sometimes growth does not make sense at all. So I think a company of one is just a business of any size that questions this current paradigm of grow at all costs, rapid growth, 10x growth hack, whatever word you want to use that sounds awful to say out loud to another human.

Louis: Let’s define the problem a bit more. Why do you think it sounds awful? Why is it so awful and what’s awful about it?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, so first of all, the research that I’ve done doesn’t line up with the TEDx or keynote style talks of like growth is always good. And what I found through research was that a lot of businesses actually go out of business because they try to grow too quickly or because they put growth as like the top metric that they need to achieve or track, whether it’s because their venture capitalists have told them that we need you to have hockey stick growth or that sort of thing. And what I found is that the businesses that do the best for the longest are the ones that maybe do grow, but they grow slowly, organically, and more in a straight line than just 20% month over month Silicon Valley bullshit, which might work, but it probably isn’t going to work for very long or probably is only going to work for the investors who will be able take their money out, fire the CEO and then go public or do some other dumb shit with the business.

The Research Behind Growth Failure

Louis: What research do you find that correlates with what you said there?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, so there was a study done by the Startup Genome Project that found, I think it was 2/3 of businesses went out of business not because of competition, not because of market change, but because they had chased Growth above everything else. There was another study done by the Kauffman Institute, who looked at that Inc. 5000 list, which a lot of companies want to be on. That’s like the top 5,000 fastest growing companies in the world. And the Kauffman institute found that five to eight years later, I think it was like 70% or more of those businesses had gone out of business, similar to the Startup Genome project which had found that they’d gone out of business because they had chased growth. And I think the problem there, if you think about it, is it’s really hard to be profitable, to be focused on profit and to be focused on growth at the same time. Because growth typically means you’re forsaking profit in the now in the hopes that one day you’ll be profitable, one day your volume will scale to a point where profit can happen. Whereas if you’re focused on profit, how does a profitable business go to business? They don’t. If you’re making money as a business, you can keep going. If you’re chasing growth and forsaking profit, then that’s risky. Then you’re running into like, if this doesn’t work out, then we’re completely fucked.

Louis: I’m just going to take a few seconds here for people to digest what you just said because it’s so obvious, right? And I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Like the basis of marketing is to understand people so well that you can give them what they need and you sell a good product so they buy it, you get the profit, you invest it and you grow this way, right? That’s the base. That’s how businesses have been done for a long, long time. Until recently, until, as you said, the financial pressure to grow at all costs because it benefits certain people or the economy in general has started to appear more and more. And you see businesses that are trying to not to sell a good product for people and make them happy, but genuinely creating a company to make money and just fucking grow and IPO without making a single line of profit. Now I’m going to put my hat off the VC person right now. It’s not a real hat, it’s a fictional hat, but it’s a hat that is going to ask you, well, it’s all well and good, but without these type of VC funds, you wouldn’t have Uber, you wouldn’t have Lyft, you would not have like VC backed companies that are like making progress into the world.

Why VCs and Rapid Growth Don’t Always Create Value

Paul Jarvis: Are they making progress in the world? I think so. This is the problem. So this is the problem that I have with capitalism. And I think that the definition of capitalism can vary. But I think the way that commerce used to work probably, I don’t know, before, like pre industrial revolution, the way that commerce used to work was it was a two sided exchange. It was a value exchange. It was somebody got enough value from something you did to give you money and you got enough value from their money to keep doing that thing. And so it was like capitalism at that time, or commerce at that time was collaborative because you’d be working with other people, you’d be trading, you’d be working within a community where everybody’s needs would be met. Whereas nowadays capitalism is extractive and exploitive where there’s very few people basically taking all of the value out of the marketplace and putting it into their pockets, right? Like with VCs or with like super, super rich 1% people, they’re taking the, they’re not giving much value back. They’re just taking all of that from the market. And so we get things like these shady apps that are like, do you want to buy this? Yes or no? And the buttons are always in the same place. And then if you click no enough, the button switch and you think you’re clicking on no, but the button switched and it’s like, how is that really benefiting anybody? How is that any value to anybody? But I do think so on the flip side of that, and I argue both sides all the time are just weird like that, because I think a lot of these things are too nuanced to be just binary black and white. So I think that sometimes businesses need to exist at a large scale. Like Uber wouldn’t work if it was just me driving around in my car saying like, hey, does anybody want to ride? Or like Airbnb wouldn’t work if there was a guy named Bob in Boise, Idaho who had a spare bedroom. And like that was Airbnb. Like these companies like that don’t work on a small scale. Did they need money to start? Could they have ramped up slower? Probably. Did they need to ipo? I think a lot of businesses IPO because they’re not profitable and they just want to get more shareholders involved to start making money in the hopes that they’ll be profitable. Kind of how stock exchanges work. But I think that for a lot of us and for a lot of businesses, we don’t need that scale. Like my business, I sell courses and some software that doesn’t need to be big. Those businesses don’t need to make like a million dollars a month to succeed. Those businesses can make a tiny amount of money. And because the margins are high and because I don’t have very high cost of living or I don’t have to spend much on the solutions that I do, I don’t need a lot of customers, I don’t need to take, I don’t need to dominate any marketplace I’m in because I only need to make enough money in those marketplaces where I’m providing value to other people and they’re seeing enough value in the products that I make to give me some money. And it works.

Louis: The people that listen to Gary Vee, for example, traditionally, and I’m not trying to make a blanket statement on those people, but traditionally there will be younger people, entrepreneurs, people who want to launch something. I was one of them before a few years ago. And I remember thinking, I want to be a fucking millionaire. I want to make so much money, I want to have this power. I want to see myself in this red Ferrari. I want to drive downtown San Francisco. This is the kind of the life that maybe some of you listening right now might be thinking right now that you want to achieve. But you have this maturity and you’ve probably gone through a lot of stages towards, towards this last step, which is like being happy, being content with what you currently have and not trying to chase yet another goal, yet another goal, yet another goal. How do you convince people that I’ve described that might listen to Gary Vee’s podcast way too much and need to listen to everyone hates marketers more by the way. How do you convince them to think again about this mentality?

Breaking the Future Happiness Trap

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, I think just like I explained how being a growth focused business means that you forsake profit in the now in the hopes that something happens in the future. The exact same logic applies to what you just said, where if you’re chasing these big goals, you’re basically saying, like, fuck it, I’m not happy right now. If I get a red Ferrari or I live in San Francisco and pay like $10,000 a month in rent for a tiny one bedroom. Like if these things, if my business gets like to 100k mrr, like if these things happen in the future, then I will be happy. That is risky. Like to me, that’s risky. I’d rather figure out how to be happy in the present than be happy if all the things work out in the future. Because most of the time things don’t work out the way you planned. Sometimes life is gonna shit on your Face, to use a really awful but really apt analogy, is that you don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s just like when people are like, oh, I wanna write a best selling book. And it’s like, I don’t. Like, how do you do that? I’ve had a best selling book. A lot of it is just like so many different little things that happen that I’m in control of some of them, I’m not in control of other of them and I can kind of stack the deck. But like, it’s really hard to say because then like everybody would do it. Like if it was just a matter of being like, okay, I want to write a best selling book, this is the things that I do, or I want to start a company that makes like a million dollars a month. If it was just a step by step formula, then everybody would do it and nobody would be poor. Like, it just doesn’t work that way. A lot of it is luck. And a lot of times successful founders confuse their luck with like foresight when really it’s just you can see patterns if you’re looking back and like, oh yeah, all of these things I did made sense and they got me to where I am. But when you’re in it, you don’t know those things. So I would rather be happy in the present. I would rather figure out how, like to drive. I was gonna say a Prius, but I fucking hate Priuses. How to drive any other car that isn’t worth like $200,000. Like, if the car gets you from A to B, then be happy. If your house has a roof and it doesn’t leak when it rains, then like, maybe there’s a way to be happy in the present. Actually, Gary. I’ll argue on the side of Gary V for a sec, even though I agree with you, he’s even said that a lot of times people just want these goals because they’re status symbols. Like there was one, I was watching something where he was talking to a guy who had. He was like, Gary was like, what kind of car do you drive? And the guy was like an M3 or something, like a nice BMW. And he’s like, can you afford it? And the guy’s like, not really. And he’s like, well, what are you doing? These things aren’t going to make you. If you’re not happy now, things in the future aren’t going to make you happy later. If you find a way to be happy now, the chances are you’ll find a way to be Happy as life changes or as things change in the future.

Louis: And to be clear, I didn’t say, I didn’t imply that Gary Vee, all of the studies are wrong. More that the people listening to him tend to be with these type of goals and not saying they’re wrong. I mean they’re right in their own ways if they want to reach those goals. But I think long term it’s not really sustainable. You can’t really just hope for, as you said, a best selling book. And what if it never happens? So before we dive in into a bit more detail on what are the components of a company of one or the kind of content, creative things that you need to think to become a company of one. I just want to dive in into one aspect of marketing that I despise and that you mentioned growth, hacking and this mentality. Again, people listening to this might very well read what are the latest growth hacks I need to use to game the system and to get more followers, subscribers, buyers. For example, I saw recently on Facebook Group that I was part of someone mentioning this hack where you can just use Pinterest to get shit, tons of popular images from Google Image, put them automatically into your Pinterest board and generate Google traffic out of them and get like 100,000, 200,000 visits a month from it. And people were all over the place for this. They were like, oh my God, how did you do this? I want to do the same. How do you convince people thinking this way that there’s a better way to live and to generate money?

Growth Hacking vs. Sustainable Business Building

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, so I mean I think for a lot of things like that, a lot of growth hacks are focused on vanity metrics and vanity metrics don’t translate into revenue. So for example, something like that, maybe your Google traffic will increase or maybe your Pinterest traffic will increase. But like, is that generating more revenue? Is it generating more customers? Is that creating more like long term relationships with customers? I doubt it. Like I can’t see how that is possible. And so I think there’s even like growth hacks to like get your mailing list subscribers up. I’ve experimented with some things like having an on exit intent pop up window that shows something. And yes, the numbers on my mailing list increased, but the number of opens didn’t, the number of clicks didn’t, the number of buys didn’t. So while my mailing list numbers increased, that sounds like, oh, my mailing list is so big it didn’t mean shit because it wasn’t translating into more sales or more engagement or even more. It wasn’t even translating into more conversations. So I think a lot of times we need to think about is this actually going to do anything for my business and for myself? There’s kind of two ways to run a business long term. The first way is to either constantly have to find new people to sell to because you’re churning and burning. Basically you’re just trying to find new people to get into the funnel and they’re either going to relent and buy or they’re going to leave or the other side, and that’s kind of more of the growth hacking side. And then the other side is to sell in a way that people feel happy about, where they feel happy to buy and they feel happy to keep coming back. Where you can have maybe a small group of customers, but you sell to them over years. For me, decades, I have some customers that have bought most of the things I’ve made, or they buy some of the software and they stay with it. And I would rather have a small group of people that I can get to know, get to understand and work with where they’re supporting my business, where they’re constantly buy. Like more than half of the people that buy one product from me buy more than one product from me. There’s a high percentage of people that buy all of the products. And those people are the best people in the entire world. But like, if I was focused on growth hacks, if I was focused on like ever increasing my audience, I wouldn’t be able to get to know these people. Like, typically when somebody buys something from me and I get that like stripe notification or the PayPal notification, I kind of recognize. Most of the time I recognize the person’s name or email address because we’ve had a conversation on Twitter or we’ve emailed with each other or they bought something else or I’ve seen them in a Slack channel that I run. And so like these people, they’re trusting me because I spend time conversing with them, I spend time listening to them. I can get to know them and empathize with them because the group of people isn’t constantly just like exploding with growth. And that to me feels like a better way to do things and a more sustainable way to do things.

Louis: Great answer. It’s difficult to come up with anything else but that. I completely agree with you on all fronts. And the example of the exit pop up is interesting because I was thinking of this same thing with software selling you, the fact that you get more subscribers, you Understand because you’re experienced and you know your stuff, that the actual goal of a business is to generate happy customers. And if you generate happy customers, as you said, they’re going to talk to their friends about you, they’re going to buy more from you with this metric on board. You know that XC popup makes very little sense because as you said, you might get more email subscribers, but those people won’t do shit. And this is why the growth hacking mentality is something that I can’t get around is because marketing and business is a system. All parts of the system come connect with each other in ways that you can’t really understand because it’s so complex. It’s like a car. If you take every single path out, you can’t drive the fucking car. It’s not connected. So it’s part of a system. And if you fuck up with the system too much, if you hack your way through each step of the funnel with exit purpose, followed by emails with fake scarcity, followed by whatever else trick you want to get, you’re not going to generate those happy customers. The system is going to start to fall apart. And this is why the smartest people I know make it difficult to buy from you, right? Like you, for example, you don’t have the creative class running 365 days a year. You make it available to only a certain period of time because you want to create tension. And you know that people who experience the tension that says, I really want to buy, I can’t believe I can’t buy it right now. You know that there will be more they will buy in the future. Very much like this Philip Morgan, who’s a consultant on positioning that you might know, makes it super difficult now to buy from. He’s doing a sort of incubator with five people maximum. And he makes people go through another podcast to know how to apply to it, because he knows that the best people will actually end up buying. They will be the people going through this podcast and whatever. So make it easy or easier is not necessarily the answer because there’s tension that you need to create. Anyway, I wanted to say that. So let’s go back to the components of Company of One. There is one thing that struck me that I remember vividly is because I actually interviewed the guy that you mentioned, Sean d’ Souza from Psychotactics, and you explained that as an example, he decided that $500,000, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s the number, was the maximum amount of revenue he needed or profit. I don’t remember one of the two that he needed to run a successful, decent business. And he would take three months vacation every year, and he’s just happy with that. So that’s kind of the one of the component of Company. Everyone, can you give me more details on this mindset?

The Power of Defining “Enough” - Sean D’Souza’s Example

Paul Jarvis: Yeah. So this is basically Sean’s funny. I wrote about. My dad has probably. My dad’s an old English guy. He’s probably read like two books in his life. He read Company One, which I thought was funny. The takeaway that he got from reading my book was, hey, who’s your friend that sends out chocolates? Because Sean d’ Souza sends out a chocolate bar from New Zealand. Him and his wife Renuka send out chocolate bars. And he’s like, hey, who’s your friend who sends out chocolate bars? How can I get a chocolate bar? So the next time I was talking to Sean, I’m like, sean, can you please send my dad a chocolate bar? And he was like, yeah, totally. So he sent my dad a chocolate bar, which I thought was funny. But the point of Sean having an upper bound to his goal is. Is kind of the way that I describe it in the book and in the way that I talk about it is what enough is. And I think framing enough is kind of the antithesis or the counterbalance to uncheck growth or growth hacking, where enough kind of exists. And first of all, enough kind of exists in two stages where if you’re pre enough, when, say, you start a business, you don’t have any customers, you don’t have any revenue, you have to grow. Growth makes sense because you need to go from zero to something. You need to go from zero to making enough money to live, paying your bills and all of that. So growth makes sense there. But then growth. And we get into our heads, we’re like, growth is working because it’s making things better right now. So growth is working. And then we get into our heads like, okay, growth is good. And I understand how people can get into this growth mindset because in the beginning it makes sense, but if we never question it, we just always think like, okay, well, growth made sense before, growth made sense now. So I’m just going to keep growing. But I think that the kind of thesis of the book and the point of the book is that we should kind of check in on that and say, like, is growth continuing to be good? Or are we just getting diminishing returns on our growth? And so I think the second stage of enough is post Enough. So pre enough is getting to what enough is. Post enough is optimizing for what you’ve got. And Sean’s a good example of being post enough because he’s like 500k a year pays all. And that’s gross as well. So 500k a year pays all my expenses, pays for my wife and I and the nieces that he takes care of. Sometimes to live, it lets us travel for like two or three months a year, and so that’s enough for him. So if he was chasing more than he wouldn’t know. He knows his customers probably better than I do. He knows that if he wanted to grow more than that, he’d probably have to hire some people, which could cut into his margins as well. Like, he may make an extra hundred grand, but he may have to pay like 200 grand to make that 100 grand. Or if he had to go into ads, he might have to spend like. It’s like when people talk, people get obsessed with gross numbers. Like, oh, yeah, I made like a million dollars. And it’s like, well, how much did you spend to make that million dollars? $900,000. It’s like, you totally make a million dollars. You made 100k. I think we need to just kind of consider that because more isn’t always better. Like, if Sean has found a place, and a lot of people, if they found a place where they have enough money to be happy and content and live comfortably, then chasing more would cut into the freedom. And the freedom is why a lot of people start their own business in the first place. So it just doesn’t make sense.

Louis: That’s the exact mistake I’ve made in the past. Three years ago, I started a conversion rate optimization agency. It wasn’t planned this way, but as you said, life shits on your face sometimes. And I turn into a Croat consultant. And I didn’t really like it because it was all about squeezing revenue. And I didn’t feel there was the right thing. But anyway, I had enough clients to hire and I hired two people, three people. And not only grow like, we grew. Revenue, profits stayed around the same, first of all. But then the problems you start to encounter gets bigger, you know, and the headaches get bigger. Now you have payroll to think about at night. You have not only your fucking salary to pay, but you have your team salary that you’re worrying about. They are paying for a mortgage, they’re paying for their kids. This stacks up. And it’s getting. For me, it was really getting to me. And I realized hold on a second. Why the fuck did I decide to hire those people? Why didn’t I decide to just stay small and optimize what I had and just find ways to grow profit and revenue? Grow profit without necessarily increasing my team. And when I was listening to your book, that really dawned on me that if I had the insight that I have now, I would have done it completely differently. So, yes, growth at all costs. Looking at this revenue, it will be great if you get 1 million in revenue, 2 million, 10 million. Think as well of the cost that it has not only financial but also emotional cost. And all the things you don’t know, you don’t know until you start to grow this way. It’s like you discover things. You’re like, shit. Now that I have too many people on the payroll, I need to have this software to take care of. I need to pay more.

Why Hiring Can Destroy What You Love

Paul Jarvis: My.

Louis: And it just becomes incredibly, incredibly more complex going back to the system we talked about, right?

Paul Jarvis: And it takes away from a lot of times we start a business because we like to spend our days doing something like writing or making software or designing. And it’s like, this is why I’ve never hired anybody. Because if I hired people, like if when I was a web designer, I was booked like four to six months in advance always. And I could have hired and people were always like, I don’t know why you’re not hiring. Like, it doesn’t make sense. You’re not growing. And it’s like, I didn’t want to grow then because I didn’t want to promote myself out of a job that I really enjoyed into a job I didn’t enjoy because I don’t like managing people. I don’t want to do payroll. I don’t want to have to. I work for myself so I can have as little responsibility as possible and still make money making a bigger business just doesn’t make sense to me because

Louis: you don’t need the status symbol of having a startup that is making 10 million a year. You make peace with that. You don’t need that for your life. And I think that’s something that people don’t necessarily realize about the decisions they take is the status that it’s going to give you with others. The fact that people, as Seth Godin would say, people like us do things like this, it’s like, well, the people like me who are successful entrepreneurs at startups have expensive car, have startups, then I need to do the same. But maybe they’re not your people. And that used to be Me, I used to think this way because I used to look up to those guys and girls, and I realized that it wasn’t it. If I could podcast and interview people all day long, I probably would, and I would never hire someone to do it for me.

Paul Jarvis: Right.

Louis: So going back to another component of it, which is something that I think, again, Seth Godin mentions a lot in his latest book, like, this is marketing, for example, but he talked about it many times before. Is choosing a specific audience, which is, again, something that we talk about a lot in marketing. Extremely difficult to do, to stick to, because, again, you want to grow. So why not reaching everyone? Why do you think a company of one needs to have a specific audience in mind? And even the more niche, the better? Why is that?

Audience First, Product Second

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, so one, I think it’s easier to reach people if they’re segmented down from everyone. I don’t know how to reach everybody on the Internet or everybody with the television or everybody with a Netflix account. I don’t know how that works. But, like, as you segment it down and get a bit more specific, you’re like, okay, well, these types of people spend time reading these publications, so maybe I can write for them. Or these types of people spend time in this subreddit. Maybe I’m going to start talking to them in there. And I think that the. It’s fine because I get. People ask me all the time. They’re like, well, I have a bunch of ideas for products. I don’t know what to make. Or I’ve made this product and I can’t find anybody who wants to buy it. And I’m like, you’re going in the wrong direction. Like, you’ve done. You’ve done the second thing first. And what I mean by that is I don’t actually know how to make a product and then go find an audience for it. Like, I don’t actually know how that. Like, I don’t know how that works. I would suck. I also suck at cold calling. Like, if you put me in a. Or like any kind of cold sales. If you put me at a car dealership and said, like, hey, Paul, go sell that person a car. I know a ton about cars, but I would be the most awkward salesperson in the entire world because, like, I don’t know how to sell in that way. But what, what I do know how to do is build an audience or start listening to a specific group of people, a niche, a market, whatever you want to call it, and start communicating with those people, start learning from those people, start Empathizing with those people. Start looking for patterns in what those people want. Every single product I’ve ever created in my entire life hasn’t been, I have an idea to make something. I’m going to go make it and then go try to sell it. Every single product I’ve ever made has been, okay, I’m talking to this audience. I’m part of this community. I’m part of this group. This is what these people are saying they need. I can make that thing and say, hey, everybody, y’ all said you wanted this thing. I’ve made it. You can buy it if you want. And like. That to me is the like. The other way is doable, but harder. My way, I think, is easier because it’s also. You also don’t have to be as pushy because you’re not looking for sales. You’re looking to find a way to connect the audience you’re already part of or communicating with or talking to and show them the value in the thing that you’ve made specifically for them because they asked for it. Every single thing I made was because a bunch of people asked me for it. Creative class. Every book I’ve written. The only reason I wrote Company One is because I wrote an article for my mailing list probably three years ago now called something like, I don’t care about growth. I usually get 150,250ish replies to my newsletters. I send it one a week. It’s called the Sunday Dispatches. So that makes sense. And for that email that I wrote, I got, I don’t know, 1200, 1500. I was just, like, astronomical the amount of people saying, why is nobody else talking about this? I thought I was the only one. I feel like, why isn’t this a book? All right, then this can be a book. And then I wrote Company of One. If nobody had wanted it yet, I wouldn’t have written it.

Louis: And it doesn’t feel yucky to do it this way. Right. At all. It’s natural, natural process. And this is why I think it’s much better to start with an audience rather than a product, as you said.

Paul Jarvis: Right.

Louis: It’s like you start with, like, pretty much what I’m doing with the podcast. I never really thought about what can I sell to those people or who are those people in the first place. I just started something to give genuinely to just help myself, interview people, to learn from them, and then let’s see if it’s helpful for people. Then I got feedback. So I improved the podcast. I Improved it, improved it, improved it. But I’m still at a stage where I know people quite well. I know who listens to the podcast, but I would have never imagined that, for example, a third of the people listening would be marketing consultants or freelancers. In my head at the start, I was just thinking in house marketers would be the one listening. But actually I get surprised and surprised over and over again. But starting with the audience then makes it so much easier, as you said, to understand the problem they suffer from. And you don’t need to overly engineer the research or overly engineer the fucking the process. You’re just part of the conversation, as you said. Right. You just know it.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, that’s why my mailing list, it’s fine. People are always like, I don’t know how you have time for your mailing list, because I write an article a week and send it out every Sunday. I mean, I don’t know how I wouldn’t make time for my mailing list when this is how I communicate with my audience. This is how I learn from the people who are likely to buy something from me. I should be spending more time with my mailing list because right now I spend probably a couple hours writing a week and probably four or five hours replying to people a week. And I could spend more, like, I could spend more time doing that because this is like, I have a direct connection with the people who give me money. Why wouldn’t I spend as much time as possible making things for them, but then also talking to them and listening to them? It wouldn’t make sense to do it any other way.

Building Real Relationships Through Email

Louis: I think I know the answer to this question, but I want to triple check. You receive 200, 250, sometimes like 1,000 replies. And the article is very popular. And you reply to every single one of them, right?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah. Reply to. Unless it’s just like, good job or like thumbs up emoji, I don’t reply to those. But somebody has a question or if somebody says something really good, then, yeah, I reply to like, I take half a day usually to just reply to everybody, basically. Yeah.

Louis: But if you had this growth at all cost mindset, you probably look at automating this fucking thing, right? Like, oh, my God, you’re spending four to five hours answering people, what the fuck?

Paul Jarvis: People are always confused as well. They’re like, I can’t believe you replied. I’m like, you sent me an email. What did you think would happen? I would rather run a business that’s human and humane. I run a business Because I like doing business. I like talking to other people. Like I said, it would be awkward if I had to sell to them. But just having a conversation with them, it’s totally easy. They’re gonna make their own minds up whether they want to buy something or not. And luckily most of them do. But yeah, like you said, if I was focused on just growing, and I don’t care if my mailing list grows or not, at this point, it’s enough where they bring in, they generate enough revenue for me to live comfortably and pay my bills. So if I was focused on growing my, it’s like 30,000 or 35,000 or something. Now, if I was focused on like getting 1,000 people a day or 10,000 people a week or 100,000 people a week, I wouldn’t be able to have those conversations because I’d be getting too many emails. I wouldn’t be able to reply to them. I wouldn’t be able to get to know my customers. I wouldn’t recognize people’s email when they bought something from me. Like, growth at that point wouldn’t like, it would ruin my business if I was focused completely on growth and not on the audience that I already have. Like, these people are already paying attention. These are the most important people in my list to my business, not the people who could be on my list that I need to grow to get. I’d rather just like, retention is so much easier than acquisition. It’s cheaper, it’s faster, it’s easier on all regards, but most of the time people are like, I just need acquisition. I just need acquisition. Like, I just need to grow, grow, grow. Who cares about the churn or offset churn by just growing faster. And it’s like, that’s so much work. Like, it’s just you’re giving yourself more work than you need to give yourself.

Louis: And to go back to the point about the email list that might grow to a point where you can’t reply to everyone. I want to go back to the system thinking paradox. In a sense. It’s like your system works really tightly at the minute. You have an email list, you send an email every week, people reply. You have connections. Those people feel like they can really trust you because they have conversations with you. They might recommend more people coming in. They might buy your product. But what if you grow to. Let’s say you have this growth hacking switch in your brain and you’re like, okay, shit, let’s go to 100,000. Now, 100,000 would mean if you keep the same Quality of article. You would probably get now 600, 700 replies every week. And it means you would need to spend 18 hours of your week to reply to them. And so therefore you have to cut that time. And therefore you will stop replying to a few people. And therefore those people might not feel like they are being listened to, or they feel that they know you or trust you, and therefore they might not buy your product anymore, etc. Etc. So the big takeaway for me reading your book is also that it’s like you really want to make sure that you understand the full system of your business and that you don’t compromise it by doing something stupid like this.

Paul Jarvis: Exactly. And I don’t want to hire people. Like, people would probably be thinking, like, why not just hire somebody to, like, write the articles or to make the products or reply to people? I could have a VA replying to people, but like, if somebody’s replying to Paul Jarvis and like a guy named Val or a girl named Angela replies like, that’s not like that. Just. That would just feel weird if, like, there was a VA replying like, that’s not the business I want to run. Like, I know how I want to spend my day. I know how I want my business to operate. And so I’m always just trying to line up the decisions I make with knowing that this is the type of business that I want to have.

Louis: What other components of a company of one have we not mentioned or forgotten to mention?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, I think there’s a. I mean, resilience is a big one. I think that a lot of times, and resilience is really just three things. It’s accepting reality. We don’t control everything because we don’t. And life will shit on our face as we’ve covered. The second thing is having a sense of purpose really, really helps because even if things are going wrong, then, you know, you’re still like, my sense of purpose is knowing the type of business I want to have, which is a small business, and knowing that I want to serve a small group of people indefinitely instead of serving a big group of people once. So I think having a sense of purpose is really important to resilience. And then the third thing is ability to adapt. And I think this is a huge one because I think things change all the time or because we’re not in control of everything. Things can come up, things can change. It’s just like the way that I did business 20 years ago in the 90s is totally different than now. There’s different Technology, it used to take like six months to build to build like an e commerce system and get a merchant account. Now I can sign up for a Shopify or a Stripe account in like 30 seconds. So, like, you have to keep learning, you have to keep adapting. Like, I spend quite a bit of my time every week learning. Like, I didn’t. I don’t have a university degree, I don’t have any degrees. I finished high school and then basically stopped the school. But I still spend hours and hours a week learning new things, learning new skills, learning just new information. And I think that that’s so important to like, just not stop. Like, I always just assume I don’t know anything and then take it from there and then try to see how if I don’t know anything, how much I can learn to kind of close that gap a bit.

The Three Pillars of Business Resilience

Louis: I want to go back to the first point about resilience. It seems like you’ve read a lot about stoicism and this kind of philosophy, right? Which is like, exactly. Don’t focus on the things that you can change that you have control over. Mainly your brain. That’s basically it. I mean, not necessarily your brain, the organ, but your thoughts. Even though you might argue that from recent research, you actually don’t fucking control most of it anyway. But anyway, that’s the thing you can control the most. Don’t focus on the rest and focus on what you can control. What are the elements of stoicism or other type of philosophy and way of thinking do you think are relevant to this as well?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest ones from the Bhagavad Gita, which is like yogic philosophy and which I’ve talked about a bunch of times, just not in those words, is one of the lines from that book obviously translated into English, is that we’re entitled to the labor, not the fruits of our labor, which is what I. Which is kind of like that. Just thinking about that kind of blows my mind. But that’s what I was talking about when I’m thinking, when I was talking about, like, we need to figure out how to be presently content with the things that we have and not focused on the things that we might attain that could make us happy. Because especially with money, man. Like, I think money is more of an amplifier than a fixer. So, like, if you’re an unhappy person poor, you’re going to be an unhappy person rich. If you’re an awful person poor, then you’re going to be an awful person rich. So I think that if we focus on the process instead of the outcome. Like, I’m gonna write a book because I like writing, because I like sharing, because I like putting words on the paper. I like figuring out what I think about something by writing about it. That’s typically what I do. And that’s me enjoying the process. That’s me enjoying the labor. If I was only writing to become, like, a New York Times bestseller, then I wouldn’t be happy writing, and I would feel like a failure at the end of it if I didn’t become a New York Times bestseller, because I would feel like, oh, I did all this work for nothing. Where. Because if I’m just happy with the process of writing and sharing and exploring my ideas, then it’s like, I’ve already won. I finished the book. I gave it to my publisher. I feel content, I feel happy, I feel accomplished because I did the work. And if doing the work is enough, then I think we know that we’re on the right track. Whereas it’s like, well, my business isn’t successful until it makes a million dollars a month. It’s like, why, bro? Why does it need to make that much money? Maybe you need like $10,000 a month or less to be. To be happy or comfortable. And so I think that if we focus more on the process and less on the hopeful outcome of the process, we can get a lot further with not feeling like a failure at all times.

Focus on Process, Not Outcomes

Louis: I’m nodding aggressively right now. I know you’re listening to this podcast. You can’t see me, which is a shame. But I’ve discovered that the hard way. I used to always, always think of the outcome that I might get by doing something. And I used to give up very, very easily. Anything I would start would be like, after one week, oh, shit, I don’t get enough traffic. Fuck, let’s just stop it, right? And when I switch the focus to the process, doing things every day, just focusing on that, knowing that what you’re doing is good enough, that you will get feedback anyway. So that’s the loop that is closed anyway. You’re just going to improve, and you just need to fucking show up. Because that’s at the end of the day, one of the core principle of. Of good marketing and good business and having good life is you show up every day, every week, every month. You do the same thing over and over again. Like, you send a newsletter every Sunday. You publish a podcast episode every Tuesday. You just show up, people will trust you, and the outcome will come. You don’t Know when exactly, but it will. You just need to stick to what you believe, which is why connection to the second point, purpose, is so important. If you do something you truly believe in, then you will stick to your process, even if at the start you don’t have the outcome you hope for. You shouldn’t even look at your stats at the start. Just focus on the fucking process.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, I mean, my mailing list was like a couple hundred people at the end of the first year. And like, people are always like, well, how do you, Like, I want to build a mailing list like yours and have it like, at the size that it’s at. I’m like, send an email every, every week and don’t ever miss a week for six years. And it’s like, that’s not the sexy answer, but that’s like. And continually listen to feedback. And it’s not like there’s no growth hack there. Like, six years of work isn’t a growth hack, but it’s what honestly happens.

Louis: Yeah, I’m glad you said that because I wanted to ask you how long you’ve been doing that for. And usually the answer always goes back to that. How do you become a good blogger? How do you rank number one for super competitive terms? How do you fucking have a successful podcast? Or you just channel? Well, just show up, do the work, and do it again, and do it again because you love it. You’re going to keep going. And one day, not one day necessarily, one magic day, but it will happen. You will get the results you’re hoping for, or at least you will get some results if you keep at it. That’s the biggest lesson for me, I have to say. In this project, everyone has marketers compared to anything else I’ve done before. It’s just the first time I’ve decided, you know what, I’m just going to fucking show up and do the work. But because I enjoy it, and I think this is also the lesson, I don’t think I could stick to writing an article every week on an email list because I hate. I don’t necessarily like writing. However, I can probably do easily two interviews a day like this one, no problem, without fail for five years. But you probably wouldn’t. I don’t know, you might, but, oh,

Paul Jarvis: no, I couldn’t do. I do, like, probably 10 interviews a year for podcasting and like, that’s enough for me. But like, writing an article every week, I love it. Like, it’s been 60 years.

Louis: I still love gives me anxiety. I was just thinking about It. So there you go. So it needs to be connected with who you are. The kind of things you like doing that are energizing you.

Paul Jarvis: You.

Louis: Because you can’t really stick to something that doesn’t energize you. So you’re going to discover that by doing shit. Right. And you might fail a few times, but I’ve discovered podcasting or interviewing people or just talking like this on a microphone by accident, really, when I was trying before to stick to a blog and stick to written form of content, which I just don’t fucking enjoy. That’s it. I’m not good at it. I don’t like it.

Paul Jarvis: Fuck that.

Louis: That just going to do video and podcast and that should be good enough to start with. Anything else we haven’t touched on from your fantastic book or other stuff you wanted to chat about on this?

Paul Jarvis: No, I think we covered a lot here. I like it.

Louis: All right, let me ask you a few questions that I tend to ask at the end of the show. What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?

Paul Jarvis: Listen to people. Super, super techie. But yeah, like, I good market.

Louis: What software do you use for that?

Paul Jarvis: Anything. I’m only joking. Yeah, I mean, I think we try to put all of these technology things in between talking to human beings. Like human beings. We don’t need to.

Louis: What are the top three resources you’d recommend our listeners today?

Paul Jarvis: So other than company one, I don’t know. I think having a. Having a newsletter, whether you send out articles or podcasts or whatever, I think is a good idea. It doesn’t even matter. They’re all of the, like, I obviously teach a course on mailchimp, so I like mailchimp, but like, it’s a super competitive market, so pretty much anything that is a newsletter software is good. ConvertKit, whatever. Mailchimp, doesn’t matter. So doing that and I think just like being part of the community. And again, this is not like there’s not a tool for this, but be part of the community you want to sell to. Like, it just, it doesn’t make sense. Like there’s. I think it was Justin Jackson, one of my buddies who’s a marketer, was talking about how his friend wanted to make real estate tool. He wanted to make tools for real estate agents. And Justin was like, well, how many real estate agents do you know? And he’s like, none. And he’s like, well, how many real estate conferences have you been to? And he’s like, none. It’s really hard to make something for people you don’t understand. So I think a lot of times the first step is like being part of the audience you want to sell to get to know them, engage, participate. Right. Like do those things. And that doesn’t require like, maybe there’s a subreddit for it, but maybe there isn’t a tool at all for it.

Louis: Okay, so a newsletter tool. Listening to people, going to conferences, anything else.

Paul Jarvis: Participating. Yeah, yeah. Learning as well, I think spending time learning, not just your own like isolated bubble or niche or whatever, like learn other things. Like I think that it, it just makes us better people. And I mean that’s where I think like growth isn’t always good in business, but I think personal growth always is good if you expand your mind, if you expand the boundaries of what you think. You know, if you challenge the things you hold as facts, I think you can, you can just become a more well rounded and more intelligent person if you challenge the ideas that you hold to be true.

Louis: That’s a great way to end the, to end the conversation. I have one last question to ask because I think people are very eager to know how can they send this email where they get a reply? So where can listeners connect with you, learn more from you?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, if you Google Paul Jarvis on the first couple pages, the website’s pjrbs.com, which most people can’t remember to type in, just Google my name. Paul Jarvis. Sunday dispatches is on every page on my website. There’s no social shares, there’s no anything else. The only thing you can do on my website is read articles or sign up for my mailing list on purpose.

Louis: Begin. Yeah, creating tension and not just, you know, following all the fucking growth hacks available. Paul, thanks so much for your time. Once again it’s been a brilliant conversation. I’m glad you’re challenging the status quo because we need more people like you.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on the show today. Very welcome.

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